, the more certainly will
she require to be fed. If she cannot simultaneously feed her child and
forage for herself, somebody must forage for her; and to say that
therefore the cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love,
become commodities to be exchanged for bread, is simply to cloud a clear
case with question-begging epithets. Always, everywhere, if motherhood
is to be performed at its highest, the mother must be supported. It is
not a question of commercial exchange, but of obvious natural necessity.
The foregoing chapter with its argument for the rights of mothers as a
great and neglected social principle, may be unsound throughout, but it
will certainly not be refuted by sentences such as these.

Briefly, Mrs. Gilman proposes to "do away with the family kitchen and
dining-room, to transform all domestic service from the incapable,
hand-to-mouth standard of untrained amateurs to that of professional
experts, to raise the work of child nursing and rearing to a scientific
and skilled basis, to secure the self-support of the wife and mother
through skilled labour, so that she may be economically independent of
her husband."

But if her child nursing and rearing are to be scientific and skilled,
and she is simultaneously to support herself through skilled labour, she
clearly requires to be two women or one woman in two places at the same
time. This, in effect, is what Mrs. Gilman expects. We have seen that
Mr. H. G. Wells's proposed help for motherhood consists in discharging
fatherhood from its duties: Mrs. Gilman's idea is to double the mother's
work. Both come to much the same thing.

All women, mothers or other, are to become economically independent,
instead of being "parasitic on the male," our author's unpleasing way of
recognizing that fatherhood has reached high and responsible estate
amongst mankind. Now if Mrs. Gilman's solution be feasible, we must
return to our fundamentals and see whether they are compatible with it.
She has no doubt of it. Thus:--

"If it could be shown that the women of to-day were growing beards,
were changing as to pelvic bones, were developing bass voices, or
that in their new activities they were manifesting the destructive
energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of
the male, then there would be cause for alarm. But the one thing
that has been shown in what study we have been able to make of
women in indust